I used to edit Innovation Management. My book, "The Elastic Enterprise", co-authored with Nick Vitalari and described as a must read for companies that want to succeed in the new era of business - looks at how stellar companies have gone beyond innovation to a new form of wealth creation. I speak on new innovation paradigms.
I started my writing career in broadcasting and then got involved in the EU's attempt to create an ARPA-type unit, where I managed downstream satellite application pilots, at just the time commercial satellite services entered the market. I also wrote policy, pre the Web, on broadband applications, 3G (before it was invented), and Wired Cities.
I have written for many major outlets like the Wall St Journal, Times, HBR, and GigaOm, as well as producing TV for the BBC, Channel 4 and RTE. I am a research fellow at the Center For Digital Transformation at UC Irvine, where I am also an advisory board member, advisory board member at Crowdsourcing.org and Fellow of the Society for New Communications Research.
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8 Key Insights from a Social Media Masterclass

The key to successful social media is measurement. If we can understand who is picking up our brand messaging, and sharing it, then we can refine, re-tune, improve, win etc. It’s obvious. The problem, however, is that most social media measurement involves unpleasant compromises.

Even though the huge publicity around the Radian 6 acquisition by Salesforce.com gives the impression that we’ve passed a watershed in measurement, the reality is quite different. And yet the future of companies like Salesforce, Facebook and more depend on getting this right.

To learn more about social media success, I spoke with Chris Thomas who heads up research at Media Measurement Ltd, a specialist metrics company based in London. Chris helped me recently by producing an analysis of Apple’s reputation after the Samsung patent infringement ruling. Now, Chris is an expert in this area so I’ve tried to take his insights and make them accessible to a non-expert audience. This, then, is a masterclass in social media as interpreted (or disrupted) by me.

#1. Understanding the limits of the data and the tools

Social media tools are limited in what they digest and analyze. Social media monitoring tools don’t crawl and index the entire web in the same way as Google. They primarily digest feeds – RSS; APIs etc. For easy-to-search social media (such as blogs) and for licensed and organized feeds (e.g. the Twitter firehose) they provide a great solution. For ‘long tail’ content – such as sources from niche geographic markets, or pertaining to micro communities of interest – they can be ineffective.

To compensate for this most tools will offer some sort of self-serve or managed functionality so you can add sources that you discover and believe are important to the index. These might be labelled as source profiles; watchlists; whitelists or suchlike. Getting these into the mix is an absolutely critical part of the analytical process.

It’s not unusual to find half a dozen or even fewer sources indexed by a tool in relation to a small community of interest, even in a minority Western European market like Italy or Spain. There are always many, many more relevant sources – the challenge is to find them.

#2. Doing good discovery

To overcome these limitations, and to find those sources, we always start our process with a discoveryphase – using a broad set of keyword searching / text mining applied with a large set of search tools, including simple ‘broad and shallow’ web search tools like Google. This is a critical phase that helps to identify the sources that should be tracked and indexed, and gives us an opportunity to see whether those sources are tracked as part of the social media monitoring tool’s index.

An effective desk research methodology is key here. In other words being thorough and keeping a record of being thorough.

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The first point I would reiterate is that the ability to measure data/influence from social media is significantly higher than print or television advertising. Social media is a more valuable and targeted advertising medium – no doubt about that.

The data clearly show that a person’s inner circles of connection (closest 20-30 people interacted with on social media) have on average more than 30% influence on buying decision for things in the electronics, appliance, travel and computing categories.

The notion of geo-location and documented activity will be the next valuable leap for social media. Finding the guy who rides the tour de France course on a $10,000 bike is a lot different than the guy on his couch drinking a beer watching the tour – now both “like” the Faceboook page and get the same marketing messages. getting the guy who rides is key.

Branding a memory with a social media product placement (see my CNBC blog http://www.cnbc.com/id/47447865 ) will also be highly influential. The 20-30 people who influence you and your behaviour can be “sponsored” by brands. See what Nissan is doing at the Paris Motor Show to promote the Micra as a great example this week.

It is not “generally accepted” but it is getting there. The smart brands know the higher value of social and have amassed very strong return on investment analysis based on social media over print and tv. There is such a wealth of demographic data behind the information. Brands are working hard to add the psychographic data component and then they will have a complete picture. The combination is very powerful. The other aspect of FB is that once they know the target they can reach it directly – i.e. a male, 35 years old within 100km of a major city, who has a University education and is married can be targeted directly. That can’t happen with a print or TV ad.